Anger at morning rush hour gridlock in estates
THE GAA County Board has come in for fierce critism from residents of Corish Park and neighbouring areas who woke up last Wednesday to find their estate under siege by fans trying to buy tickets for the June 10 clash between Wexford and Kilkenny at Wexford Park.
‘ There was no thought given to it by the GAA,’ said chairman of the Corish Park Residents’ Association Pat Kavanagh, his comments echoed by other estate residents including those at Whiterock View, where badly-parked match day cars recently halted the progress of an ambulance attending an elderly patient.
‘You would have thought the GAA would have told us the tickets were going on sale at 9 in the morning,’ he said.
Mr Kavanagh said large numbers of cars began building up on roads along the immaculately-maintained green at Corish Park, with cars parked nose to tail both sides of the road.
On the other side of the green a set of car tracks showed where one frusrated motorist had gone ‘off road’ to escape the congestion.
The fact that there was only one ticket booth at the park added to the problems with some fans queing for long periods to get tickets, which meant their cars were parked in the adjoining estates for long periods as well, a lot of them during the morning rush hour.
Many residents trying to take their children to school at the Gaelscoil, Kennedy Park and St Peter’s College found their way blocked, with the road too narrow to get through and in some cases their driveways blocked.
‘A lot of cars just seemed to have been adandoned.’
One local resident, who asked not to be identified, said that when she looked out of her front room window there were so many cars parked that she thought there was a big funeral on, although she said he had no major problem people parking in the estate to get to Wexford Park, which ‘ has been here since 1913’.
Commenting on garda plans to seal off the estate on the coming match day, June Roche said the problem in the past has been that often there was no-one around to patrol such restrictions and people looking for parking spots ‘just moved